Word: saddams
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...should respond to the attacks by fundamentally changing the status quo in the Middle East originated with the so-called neoconservatives whom Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had gathered around him at the Pentagon. If Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney saw 9/11 as an opportunity to settle accounts with Saddam, the neocons had loftier ambitions. They saw a chance to achieve a political transformation of the Middle East. What nobler goal could there be for U.S. military might than a democratic revolution...
...arms. Far from abating, violence in Iraq increased over time. Part of the problem was the insufficiency of U.S. boots on the ground. General Eric Shinseki turned out to have been right that "something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers" would be needed to stabilize post-Saddam Iraq. Trying to do the job with around 135,000--roughly 1 American for every 210 Iraqis--exposed a part of the spectrum that the U.S. could not fully dominate: the Arab street. U.S. soldiers patrolling strife-torn cities could be killed or maimed by the simplest of improvised explosive devices...
...after the original invasion--even before the U.S. death toll in Iraq passed the thousand mark--support for the war had dropped below 50%. True, new evidence came to light of the dictator's crimes against his own people. True, opinion polls suggested that Iraqis overwhelmingly preferred democracy to Saddam. But U.S. voters did not see these as sufficient grounds for risking American lives. The Bush Administration's contentions that Saddam had links to al-Qaeda and possessed weapons of mass destruction proved groundless...
Almost as big a miscalculation was the military's failure to understand the nature of the threat to Iraq's security. At first it seemed as if the U.S.-led coalition was facing an insurgency led by Saddam loyalists, with the support of foreign terrorists linked to al-Qaeda. But increasingly what was happening in Iraq was a sectarian war between the Sunni minority and the Shi'ite majority. The country that Americans had set out to democratize had, on closer inspection, voted to break apart. A spiral of tit-for-tat massacres in ethnically mixed Baghdad and the surrounding...
...sweeping talk of "ending tyranny in our world," Bush has been circumspect in implementing his freedom agenda. He got off to a good start with the overthrow of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, which liberated more than 50 million people from two of the most oppressive regimes in the world. Since then, unfortunately, much of the momentum for democratic change has been lost, in large part because of the increasing chaos in Iraq. And yet it would be a mistake to become overly dismissive of the long-term prospects for democracy in the Middle East. That would be like writing...